Enthusiasms and expostulations, by Glenn Kenny

20th Century history

July 31, 2013

I am grateful to the critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum for a good many reasons, and most recently I find that I owe him for steering me in the direction of this splendid book, a far less hyped correlative and corrective to the Henry Jaglom/Peter Biskind offering My Lunches With Orson, which I considered on this blog a couple of weeks ago.

The eleven-year-old Welles was enrolled at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois in 1926. Roger Hill, twenty years Welles' senior, was an instructor there; he later inherited the position of headmaster, which had been that of his father, Noble Hill. Roger Hill was one of Welles' earliest mentors and a lifelong friend and supporter, and, according to the introduction to this book by Tarbox, a grandson of Hill's, Hill and Welles began recording their phone and in-person conversations in the early '80s in the hopes that the tapes would aid in their respective memoirs. The first recording in the Tarbox book is from November 25, 1982; the final one is from October 9, 1985, the evening before Welles' death. This is the same period in which the conversations that make up My Lunches With Orson were recorded. But while there is a certain amount of crossover, there is absolutely no redundancy here. While I'm not going to address the controversy concerning whether or not Jaglom is entirely truthful when he says his conversations with Welles had been recorded with Welles' prior consent, the Welles in My Lunches, sometimes truculent, spiteful, perverse, given to venting resentments, etc., is a particular kind of private Welles who coexists with an Orson who is very aware of the fact that he is giving a performance for a younger admirer. Is the Welles in the Hill conversations on his best behavior because he clearly knows that these conversations are in some sense intended for posterity? I would say yes and no, and I would also say that the Welles that emerges in Tarbox's book is the truer Welles. And yes, it is a Welles that is more noble than the one constructed via Biskind and Jaglom.

That Welles lets his better angels speak through him via Hill has to do with, you'll see if you read the book, which you definitely should, his ease with Hill. The two go back a very long way, and we can infer that Hill knows Welles' quirks and foibles like almost no other, and that he forgives them all because he really loves Orson, and Orson really loves him back. There's not as much filmmaking talk in this book as there is in My Lunches; there's quite a bit of fond reminiscing about places and events and people that may not have a too-privileged place in the philosophy of those who are exclusively concerned with Welles the cineaste. But these topics are not brought up in the service of a facile nostalgia; everything touched upon in these conversations of course deeply informed Welles the artist, a deeply sophisticated man and a product of a very American culture that I sometimes fear vanished about thirty or forty years ago.

As the title implies, the book is structured as a play. Rather than lay out transcriptions of the conversation, Tarbox provides settings and stage directions and incorporates flashbacks in which the players, Welles and Hill, read from correspondance or other texts. This may strike some readers as an overly sentimental, even quaint device, and it does lead down some awkward alleys, particularly during one conversation in which Welles admits he's speaking from a phone extension in his loo. At other junctures, however, the conceit of a stage presentation works pretty beautifully, as in an exchange in which Welles and Hill discuss a small civil-rights crusade that Welles spearheaded via his radio show in 1946:

ROGER: Your finest
hour, actually many hours, on your [radio show segment] Almanac was
championing a black soldier who, returning to his hometown somewhere in the
South, was beaten by a mob. What was his name?

ORSON: Isaac
Woodard. He wasn’t beaten by a mob, but by a policeman. Woodard was on a bus,
not too far from his home in South Carolina. As a stop, he took too much time
in the “colored” men’s room to satisfy the bus driver. A heated exchange
followed, prompting the bus driver to call a cop, who, without provocation,
beat the nejesus out of Woodard with a billy club, which blinded him. I
immediately inveighed against this mindless madness, and, over the next several
months, as the case unfolded, I continued to seethe over the air.

ROGER: Didn’t the
NAACP contact you?

ORSON: Yes, the
NAACP brought Woodard’s plight to my attention.

ROGER: Now it comes
back. Wasn’t he a decorated war hero?

ORSON: He served
overseas for over a year and was decorated with a battle star.

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson in an ABC radio studio
reading his July 28 1946 commentary.]

Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour.
We will blast out your name. We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X.
Yes, and your so-called Christian name. Officer X—after I have found you out,
I’ll never lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the trial. If they
jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won’t be free of
me…You can’t get rid of me…Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No,
sir. Merely an inquisitive citizen of America.

[Lights dim.]

ORSON: Week after week, I updated my audience on the
progress of the case. I was threatened with lawsuits if I didn’t cease and
desist. The threats only heightened my resolve to make America aware of the
bitter fruits of this man’s service to his country. A lot of people from the
South and North wrote and asked what business it was of mine to involve myself
in this case.

God judge me if this isn’t the most pressing business I
have. The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is
fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t.
I was born a white man and until a colored man is a full citizen like me I
haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that this colored man risked his life
to maintain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it.
Until someone beats me, and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this
microphone not as a radio dramatist (although it pays better), not as a
commentator (although it’s safe to be simply that). I come, in that boy’s name,
and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I
come with a call to action.

[Lights dim]

ROGER: What became
of the case?

ORSON: The
Department of Justice filed charges against the rogue cop.

ROGER: Didn’t the
NAACP credit you as the prime mover in causing the government to act?

ORSON: There were a
number of us on the side of the angels. I was just the one with a microphone
and a weekly national audience. Our broadcasts led to a benefit in New York on
Woodard’s behalf. Billie Holiday, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, and many others
joined me on stage and performed for an impassioned audience of over 30,000,
demanding justice for one black man and for all of black America.

ROGER: Was justice
served?

ORSON: Sadly, no.
Though the Justice Department took the case to trial, an all-white jury
acquitted the cop. I’ll never forget a line from the defense attorney’s closing
argument to the jury, “If you rule against my client, then let South Carolina
secede again.”

This is moving, still vital stuff, I'd reckon. And it speaks multitudes of both men, multitudes that are maybe willfully ignored in Biskind/Jaglom, whose book starts by taking too-giddy pleasure in Welles' deliberately impishly provocative pronouncement to Jaglom that "everybody should be bigoted." Peter and Henry should be ashamed of themselves.

The Tarbox book is also generously illustrated, not just with photos but with reproduced pages from Welles' scripts, including more than a few from the Shakespeare staging adaptations on which Hill and Welles collaborated. You can buy the book via Amazon here. And you should also read Jonathan R.'s thoughts on the book, here.

June 03, 2013

I hesitate to publicly take issue with Rob Sheffield for several reasons. First off, I find him an engaging, sharp, funny writer. Second, I'm acquainted with him and we share warm kind feelings for each other as people, I think. Thirdly, he's one of the greatest audiences I've ever had. Whenever I run into him and we converse, his laughter at whatever attempted witticisms I drop is the most appreciative I have ever heard. Knowing Rob and his pop tastes as I do, I wasn't surprised by some of the less charitable perspectives on prog (or "progressive") rock that he puts forward in his New York Times Book Review assessment of the essay compilation Yes Is The Answer. And in point of fact said review confirms, to my mind, some of the things I suspected about the book when I paged through it at a printed matter emporium and mused that this did not look like the prog-rock book I was looking for, if in fact I was looking for such a thing.

As described by Sheffield (and his description jibes with the impression I had paging through it) Yes Is The Answer seems a rather silly book, and if I'm going to read a book on prog rock, I'd prefer it to be either entirely po-faced or uproariously funny rather than rather silly. Rob, however, takes the book's silliness as a cue to propound upon the silliness of prog rock itself as far as he's concerned, and to look down his nose at the social lives, particularly the sex lives of its enthusiasts. As for its makers, he chortles at the fact that Yes once stocked a recording studio with bales of hay to evoke a properly rustic atmosphere for inspiration. This IS indeed silly, but hoe much more or less silly is it than spending tens of thousands of dollars on heroin and/or cocaine, as so many other rock musicians, progressive and otherwise, have done? But he reserves most of his nyah-nyah you can't get laid disdain for consumers of the genre. One of the book's essayists, he notes, got turned on to the music of the loosely-defined Canterbury Scene by a high-school girlfriend; "not a typical prog story, to say the least." In his kicker, Sheffield states "oblivion seems entirely suited to prog, which at its best functioned as a shelter from school, from sex, from the frightening adult world." Even without parsing too closely, this seems a curious stone to have been thrown by the author of Talking To Girls About Duran Duran. The implied demand that a more acceptable music is one that assists teens and post-teens in facing that adult world seems, frankly, unrealistic. But really, the fallacy of the generalization stems from a not-uncommon rock crit problem, that is, mistaking one's practice with that of a sociologist's.

Sheffield's actually not even ten years younger than me, so my initial mental rationalization for his curious contempt doesn't hold, entirely. And since I never even liked sociology, let alone believed that critical practice compelled me to attempt any form of it, I can only respond with anecdotal evidence that for a number of my confederates in the late '70s, a taste for prog not only embodied zero contradiction to an engagement with adulthood, but also constituted a palpable asset to it. For instance, and not to tell tales out of school, but take My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™. When I arrived at William Paterson College in 1977, he had transfered to NYU but was still a legend at the college paper, for his photographic acumen, his merciless sarcasm, his way with "the ladies" as some used to call them back then, and his ability to recite all of the dialogue from the 1933 King Kong. I didn't meet Ron until spring of 1978, at the funeral of a mutual friend who COULD have gone with me to see Richard Hell at CBGB on the weekend of his death, but instead went out to Central Jersey and...well, it's a long story...and at the funeral I asked him about the Kong thing and he responded with the exact contempt and merciless sarcasm that such an inquiry might warrant when delivered at a funeral. Ron eventually got around to forgiving me this trespass, and we became friends, and soon I was hanging around the basement of his folks' place in Clifton, which he had redone into his bachelor pad. He had an awesome stereo of separate components—I had only ever had variants of a Close-And-Play myself—and a huge record collection of mostly classical and prog. I was mildly appalled, really. King Crimson had its moments, I had to admit, having affected an appreciation of Shoenberg and Coltrane in my high school years, but despite my fondness for Eno and such I was at this point a reasonably dedicated punk rock person. "How can you listen to Yes? I mean that vocalist is the worst. And those lyrics!" "Eventually you learn to hear through it, or past it," Ron shrugged. "And you're complaining about lyrics? What about the Ramones?" "They're ironic," I nyah-nyahed back. We were both schmucks, but he made a little more immediate sense.

The point I'm taking my time getting to is that the component-stereo and sophisticated-musical-tastes combination was a crucial component of Ron's mystique in the dating department. It was I, Mr. Punk Rock and Socially Conscious Lyrics and I'm Against Society Man and all that other shit who had a bit of struggle. This is not to say that I came around to prog out of a desire to enhance my appeal to the opposite sex. My first college girlfriend, to whom I gave the flower that was my sexual innocence, was an exemplary suburban Punk Rock Girl (her copy of The Basketball Diaries was festooned with "I love you"s in the margins of the passages describing the most debauched instances of drug abuse), and when I brought home (to my first apartment, which I shared with a college roommate in Paterson, New Jersey in the late '70s, in case you're wondering where I earned my "street cred") a copy of Art Bears' debut album Hopes and Fears, which opens with an austere cover of Brecht/Eisler's "On Suicide" sung by Dagmar Krause in her direst sharp tones, she pronounced her conditional approval on grounds that it was bracingly abrasive. Which indeed it was.

The College Girlfriend, Ron, and myself, eventually started experimenting with making our own music. Ron was a keyboardist, and a pretty good one I thought (he remains to my mind sometimes frustratingly dubious with respect to his abilities in this respect), the CG played guitar, and I played a little guitar, and bellowed, and had an outsize personality, not necessarily in that order. We had another friend, a college poet, who wrote lyrics and also bellowed, or wailed; and we dicked around in various permutations trying to write songs. We thought that our differing sensibilities—Ron's prog taste was supplemented by a slight Ray Manzarek jones, and a lot of his compositional inspiration was taken from the film score work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann; CG was a big Stones person; I was "literary" and obnoxious—might create interesting material. We were not particularly correct, but we persisted, and were very constructive in coming up with band names: Transparent Things (I know, I know), Plan Nine, etcetera. Eventually CG and I broke up, and she took up with more competent and dedicated musicians who later went on to stints in real bands such as The Brandos and Dramarama (look 'em up!). But Ron and I kept at it and eventually we, in the decades-later-to-be-immortal-words of Art Brut, formed a band.

Whether or not we were any good (and the debate continues to this day as we, having reconvened largely for the purpose of continued fellowship, slouch toward the completion of a professional-grade recording of material we "composed" over thirty years ago), our unusual concept—to create music that melded the complexity of certain prog with the DIY attitude and dissonance of punk and post-punk—was a way of enabling us to engage the world rather than retreat from it. We had to do things—write material, rehearse it, and play it in front of people. Our parents weren't involved in the project. Ron and some outside friends had rented a house, and that became the GHQ for band activities, the protest of certain neighbors and roommates notwithstanding. When drummer McCallister either quit or was fired (I honestly don't remember which...he's a cop now, if you were wondering), we had to go out and find a drummer, and we were blessed for a year with the best one in not just the Hoboken/North Haledon scene but in all of northern and central Jersey, Stanley Demeski, then also of the Phosphenes and Winter Hours (both of which bands really, really hated us) and later of the Willies, then the Feelies, then Luna, and now the Feelies again. If you're familiar with his work, you know that Stanley nails the 4/4 like nobody's business, but what you might not know is that, like his fellow one-time Feelie Anton Fier, he at one point in his development learned every drum pattern on the notoriously difficult (and some might say secretly proggy) Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Our band had one highly questionable (and unsingable-over) tune called "Refraction," the main section of which had a 9/5 time signature. Once Stanley left the band, that number left the repetoire. Actually, the whole band kind of fell apart; we couldn't find an adequate let alone competent full time replacement drummer, and the band's front man was such a mikestand-kicking prima-donna non-singing asshole that nobody really wanted to work with him any more. Guess who?

Anyway, the ideal remained alive in our sensibilities if not our musical practice. You might not remember this, but the reformed King Crimson—the quartet with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Captain Fripp, and no mellotron—actually had some New Wave cred given Fripp's and Belew's session work with Bowie, Talking Heads, Blondie, and so on. Artificial Intelligence aimed to meld Gang of Four and Pere Ubu with Henry Cow, and the distances between those bands was not as huge as some might imagine. (The distinctions might not be cost-effective to poptimists such as Sheffield, I allow.) Even as Ubu founder David Thomas was running Seeds and Alice Cooper licks through a darkly arty iteration of Cleveland weltschmertz, he was engaging in correspondence with one-time Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler, with whom Thomas later worked as a solo artist. Cutler himself drummed in an iteration of Ubu that included its biggest commercial successes, including the college-rock quasi-hit "Waiting For Mary."

The point is that there was/is more to prog and its tendrils that is dreamed of in the institutional philosophy of the New York Times these days, Jon Pareles' presence at the paper notwithstanding. The sectarian anti-prog bias, not to be paranoid, is I think reflected in the illustration for Rob's review, in which Genesis-era Peter Gabriel is seen in stage makeup with mouth agape, an image meant to evoke a snicker. I do not laugh, because I'm vaguely aware of how many column inches the New York Times devotes to Lil Wayne, who, objectively speaking, doesn't present a much more overtly "admirable" visual picture. Also, one need not like what Gabriel did in order to appreciate the line his theatrical mode of presentation points directly to Lady Gaga. But again, this is par for the course for an institution that gifted us with the phrase "cultural vegetables," and at which a top reviewer interpreted an assignment to write on a book about video games as an occasion to voice his dislike of Jethro Tull.

Prog rock, Sheffield snarks in the final line of his notice, "is the genre that gave the phrase 'comfortably numb' to the language." Except The Wall (a problematic record but maybe a better one than you remember) is the work of an arena-rock band—that's part of its whole subject. As spacey as Pink Floyd's music got, it never approached prog's level of difficulty (Dave Stewart, the Canterbury Egg/Hatfield/National Health guy as opposed to the Eurythmics guy, once observed of a Robert Wyatt concert he participated in that it "turned out well despite Nick Mason's inability to play in 7/4") or popularity.

May 30, 2013

I sometimes wonder the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz's Deli "I'll have what she's having" scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner's 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you'll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a classic for a reason; Meg Ryan's Sally hoists Billy Crystal's Harry by the petard of his own sexist presumption but good. But one reason the movie is as cozy a concoction as it is has to do with the fact that after the punchline, it never returns to the topic of female orgasm; the discomfort Harry feels after initially sleeping with Sally and then fleeing from her prior to the inevitable fateful facing of facts and return to romance has nothing to do with this particular facet of sexual or emotional exchange. Someone might expect, in the depiction of their growing intimacy, a query from the acceptably neurotic Harry along the lines of "how do I know you're not faking it with me?" But the viewer is left to presume that they've worked that all out. Actually, given the way the movie progresses to its conclusion, my feeling is that the filmmakers were/are hoping that you've pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The viewer is meant to feel pleasant feelings, not particularly complicated or uncomfortable or unpleasant ones.

This idea as it pertains to comedy, and to romantic comedy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the other (what they share in common is the view that pretty much all sexual relations are somehow predicated on hostility)—and it's also changing as it pertains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of representation remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depiction of sexuality on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as it ever has been. And critics, depending on their ideological perspective, direct and/or unique experience, or just plain contrarian pissiness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a given work dealing with this representation in sometimes wildly divergent ways.

In 1969, expressing what he characterized as his sole major disappointment in director Tony Richardson's adaptation of his novel Laughter In The Dark (whose female lead's name, Anna Karina, apparently amused him no end), Vladimir Nabokov said: "Theatrical acting, in the course of the last centuries, has led to incredible refinements of stylized pantomime in the representation of, say, a person eating, or getting deliciously drunk, or looking for his spectacles, or making a proposal of marriage. Not so in regard to the imitation of the sexual act which on the stage has absolutely no tradition behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have witnessed up to now on screen—the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet—all of it is primitive, commonplace, conventional and therefore disgusting. The lack of art and style in these paltry copulations is particularly brought into evidence by their clashing with the marvelously high level of acting in virtually all other imitations of natural gestures on our stage and screen. This is an attractive topic to ponder further, and directors should take notice of it." This was in an interview with Philip Oakes of the Sunday Times of London that ran on June 22 1969 and was of course reprinted in Strong Opinions, a compendium of interviews and essays and occasionals by Nabokov.

Since 1969, significant strides, one could say, have been made in the on-screen depiction of the sex act, although it would be useless to speculate as to whether they might have found favor with the notoriously particular Nabokov. Nudity is no longer so taboo, although the proscriptions regarding who may see nudity in films remain pretty strong. The simulation of sex acts has become more realistic via the use of prosthetics (see Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy, a droll behind-the-scenes look at the absurdity and awkwardness of a film set not unlike one of Breillat's own) and digital manipulation (by which means, say, an actress' body stocking can be handily erased). There is also a mild trend toward unsimulated sex. The sex in the early films of Joe Swanberg, while staged, is often not simulated. Martin Scorsese once said he didn't like nude scenes because they stopped a film's narrative dead; cinematic open-heart surgeon John Cassavetes also largely abjured them, perhaps for different reasons. In films such as those of Swanberg's, they are inextricable from the narrative. Although I continue to insist that the discomfort the scenes in Swanberg's films might cause in a viewer have little to do with Swanberg's intentions or motivations. (I continue to believe that Swanberg began his moviemaking efforts as a Joe Francis with a film-appreciation-class schtick under his belt, and that his current films are an attempt to live that unsavory fact down.) In matters sexual as depicted on screen, there's a continuing fascination with/desire for the real. Only it's not desired in the context of pornography, at least that's the party line. Pornography, no matter what it show us, isn't art. Pornography doesn't win Palmes d'Or, nor does it get its participants commended for their bravery. Pornography doesn't count. But why should it not?

II.

Here is a passage from "Big Red Son," David Foster Wallace's essay chronicling the Adult Video News Awards of 1998. The character of "Harold Hecuba" is in fact Evan Wright, who was a writer and editor at Hustler magazine at the time. Not to potentially alienate any of my younger readership by getting too "Losing My Edge" on them, I can confirm that Wallace, writing under a dual pseudonym, here sets down the story pretty much as Wright told it (maybe overselling the super-decent-guy aspects of the detective character just a teensy bit):

"Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.'s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.'s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box's return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective—60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy—was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was 'the faces,' i.e. the actresses' faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized 'fuck-me-I'm-a-nasty-girl' sneer and became, suddenly, real people. 'Sometimes—and you never know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sudden they'll kind of reveal themselves' was the detective's way of putting it. 'Their what-do-you-call...humanness.' It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors—sometimes very gifted actors—go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: 'In real movies, it's all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.'"

Below, although it is not in any way explicit, is an arguably "not safe for work" image of then-porn-performer Stephanie Swift in an early appearance, in a segment from a pornographic anthology feature, one of whose prime directives involves demonstrating the intensity of Ms. Swift's actual orgasms.

April 03, 2013

"With all the distractions you have with assignments and deadlines, you may have missed that today is the 45th anniversary of the opening of the roadshow engagement of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY at the now long gone Capitol Theatre in New York City. Beginning on April 3rd 1968 (although the film had it's world premiere the evening before in Washington D.C.) 2001 ran for a total of 24 weeks in Cinerama with reserved seating arrangements.

"It may interest you to know the theatre was located at 1645 Broadway, which should sound familiar, as it's been replaced by the Paramount Plaza, the local home of Premiere Magazine (not to mention the offices of Jerry Langford in THE KING OF COMEDY).

"I've included a few photos which should help us appreciate what the experience might have been like seeing 2001 in that wonderful setting. Note in the newspaper clipping, while 2001 was enjoying it's run at the Capitol, BELLE DE JOUR could have been seen at the Little Carnegie theatre just several blocks away. "

Here's one of the shots Mr. Failla attached:

Mere lads at the time, we were not able to make the trip into New York to see it at this house, instead we were obligated to wait until its run at Bergenfield's Palace Theater. A transformative experience, to be sure.

January 12, 2013

My old buddy and Cleveland rocker par excellence, Mr. John Petkovic, has, for his day (but still pretty rock and roll) gig at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written a lovely piece commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the broadcast birth of Ghoulardi, and assembled an impressive sidebar of anecdotes from Friends of Ghoulardi, who include Tim Conway, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Jim Jarmusch. You should read both of these.

January 06, 2013

"Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly superb films
(they may be the two greatest documentaries ever made) but they are not really
important in the history of cinema as an art form. Nobody making films today
alludes to Riefenstachl, while many filmmakers (including myself) regard Dziga
Vertov as an inexhaustible provocation and source of ideas about film language.
Yet it is arguable that Vertov—the most important figure in documentary
films—never made a film as purely effective and thrilling as Triumph of the
Will or Olympia. (Of course, Vertov never had the means at his disposal that
Riefenstahl had. The Soviet government’s budget for propaganda films in the
1920s and early 1930s was less than lavish."—Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 1974

"To exaggerate the worthlessness of a country at the awkward moment when one is at war with it—and would like to see it destroyed to the last beer-mug and last forget-me-not—means walking dangerously close to that abyss of poshlust which yawns so universally at times of revolution or war. But if what one demurely murmurs is but a mild pre-war truth, even with something old-fashioned about it, the abyss is perhaps avoidable. Thus, a hundred years ago, while civic-minded publiscists in St. Petersburg were mixing heady cocktails of Hegel and Schlegel (with a dash of Feurbach), Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshulst pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius.

"The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said: 'Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome...One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothers, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what these swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married.'

"Here you have poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled."—Vladimir Nabokov, from Nikolai Gogol, 1944.

"Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popular
now, and for most people it is probably no more than a variant of camp.
Fascism may be merely fashionable,
and perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste will save us.
But the judgments of taste themselves seem less innocent. Art that seemed
eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no
longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it
raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The
hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be
acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical
issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more
established. Taste is context, and the context has changed."—Sontag, 1974

Three frames from the sketch sometimes called "Killer Joke," from the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Its first airing occured October 5, 1969, on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Channel One.

June 07, 2012

It's difficult to really formulate, in one's memory, just how that quality we now know as "buzz" was generated in the days before this mess we're all in now, but my recollection is that Alien DID indeed have some buzz about it before opening, despite the fact that it was a film that had no stars and its director was a relatively unknown quality. I and my collegiate pals were somewhat aware of The Duellists, but hadn't actually seen it. But we did know that this picture was coming and it was supposed to be something. There was a production story about it in the issue of Rolling Stone dated May 31st, which would have been on newsstands about a week before the film's May 25th, 1979 opening (Wenner's magazine was then, as now, a biweekly). I'm not sure if we had seen it or not.

But for whatever reason I was there for it on the afternoon of the opening day at the then-majestic (and now completely nonexistent) Stanley Warner Theatre on Route 4 in Paramus, N.J. Among my "posse" was the now-infrequent-SCR-chimer-in Joseph Failla, who's been my moviegoing companion since third grade, and My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, soon to be the keyboard player and composition maestro of the now-reformulated Haledon rock legends Artificial Intelligence. We went in with a very "bring it" attitude. And I left with the conviction that it had not, in fact, been broughten.

I'm not entirely certain whether or not I was under the influence of cannabis during the viewing (it's not unlikely, frankly) but I can tell you I was feeling pretty feisty. When the spawn of the face-sucker burst out of John Hurt's chest, unhinged its jaw, screeched, and scurried away, I actually tittered, and then sputtered, rather loudly, and with no small amount of what I then considered punk-rock indignation, "It's the Eraserhead baby with teeth!" Yes, I was pretty much the guy that you and everybody else in the sentient movie-viewing universe wants to pummel. And when the picture was over, I shrugged and seethed "That's IT?" My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ semi-fumed "It's just a slicker remake of X! The Terror From Beyond Space." And then we all went to the Forum diner and then maybe back to Ron's parents' place in Clifton to listen to King Crimson's Red and watch the pretty blue volume-level lights on his amplifier, or something.

I did not write up Alien for my college paper, thank God, or doubtless I would have puked up something daringly righteous and contrarian and dumb. I was 19 years old and although some will attest that I was a nice and amusing and even charming fellow on some levels, I was also an opinionated loudmouth asshole who thought he knew everything and that if you didn't grok Henry Cow you were an individual of entirely subpar intelligence and not much worth my time. (Of course I was also canny enough not to play Henry Cow records for all that many of the women I dated, but we'll get into that some other time.) I did not really come around to Alien until maybe the mid-80s. What turned me around was...well, it was a few things. I saw more movies, learned about form, and started—I can't emphasize enough the importance of that verb being "started"—to try and look at movies with respect to what was actually on the screen and with less of an urge to outsmart what I was looking at. The evolution of home video was one of the factors that turned Alien into an enduring classic rather than a sleeper hit. The respect it was accorded by subsequent acquaintances who clearly knew better than I did was also influential. For instance, Michael Weldon in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: "Of course it's an expensive B-movie, but it's also fascinating, well-made, and the scariest science-fiction film in ages." (Interestingly, though, as B-movies go, it wasn't THAT expensive. Still. Michael was conversant with the work of Andy Milligan.) I've since rewatched it, enjoyed it, and been frightened by it, a number of times. But I have to confess I felt no reverence to it on my first.

Point being? I'm not entirely sure. Except that when the next Alien comes around, it's not going to be made by the people who made the first Alien. It's gonna have been made by a bunch of people we're not all that familiar with. And when and if it comes around, I hope I have the eyes to see it for what it is, and if not quite that, to actually enjoy it.

UPDATE: The aforementioned Mr. Joseph Failla has some thoughts for me, and you:

I can excuse your rambunctious outbursts at that first screening of ALIEN as your way of dealing with the unbearable tension the film had generated right from the start. Even though there was a strong buzz before the film had opened (I remember months prior to it's premiere, a huge black and white Times Square billboard featuring unusual art work not featured in any of the later advertisements), nothing we read or came across prepared us for that opening day experience. The now defunct Stanley Warner theater in Paramus was Bergen County's choice showplace and largest available screen, so we could not have picked a better locale to see it with hundreds of other nervous viewers. You may have been louder than the rest of us with your reactions but I think we were all caught up with the film's unpredictability that kept us guessing what was coming next.

Up to this point, '70s science fiction extravaganzas had been presented clean and colorful (only one episode of STAR WARS had yet been released and the visitors of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS were friendly, benign beings) but ALIEN was different, it was cold, cruel and grim, it presented a nightmarish, unrelenting creation that had no apparent weakness. As BLADE RUNNER was still a few years away, ALIEN became the closest film companion we had to our copies of Heavy Metal magazine. Much of the credit for ALIEN's uniqueness has to go to H.R. GIGER (or to those who had the genius to bring him on board to design the alien planet and it's title character), the movie's completely original organic look had me fascinated from the start and here is where comparisons to earlier B-movies cease to ring true (although I'd like to cite writer Dan O'Bannon's low budget DARK STAR as a more immediate inspiration). Actually, if I had any concerns at all, was that the film's first half (climaxing with the still wrenching chest bursting scene) is so gorgeously grotesque in depicting an alien environment, overshadowed the later portions when it becomes a game of cat and mouse between the alien and the diminishing number of crew members onboard the cargo ship Nostromo. However I've amended that opinion somewhat as I now find the most agonizing sequence to watch is Captain Dallas' demise (or disappearance depending on which version you're watching) in the air shaft where the creature silently stalks him in the dark. The suspense here is truly palpable as we sense the alien closing in and hear Dallas' pleas to be taken the hell out of there! A supremely terrifying moment that has yet to be duplicated in any of the followup installments.

So while I've not seen PROMETHEUS yet, I'm approaching it with a certain amount of caution as ALIEN was always the kind of act that was virtually impossible to follow. Of all the sequels only ALIENS works for me as a release of the first film's tautness but at the same time seems to exist in a completely different universe with Ripley emerging as one of the '80s most trustworthy action heroes. Over time ALIEN itself has been idolized, sanitized and popularized out of proportion but I still regard it today as the nuts and bolts of sci-fi/horror. I feel it's only fitting for Scott to revisit his terror classic with a fresh take but I can't say he did the original any favors by re-editing it some years back, quickening the pace of the eerily atmospheric first half and then bringing the excitement to a halt with the once deleted "cocoon scene" in the second just when it needs to keep moving (a point he had defended up until this version). I questioned his hindsight then and wonder where he's coming from now bringing a whole new mythology into play that was never part of ALIEN's sleek streamlined plan. No, I never worried what part the "space jockey" played in all this, I considered him a curious mystery that was best not explained (nor do I ask who the giant skeleton belongs to in PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) but I do question if it will be worth sacrificing Del Toro's pet MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS project for PROMETHEUS? I mean if the main stumbling block preventing Del Toro from seeing this through was too large a budget for an R rated film, there was always a chance he would one day take another swipe at it but with PROMETHEUS treading the same ground, will he ever again feel MOUNTAINS worth the effort to realize?

June 05, 2012

So for some reason or other the "film criticism, que-est-ce-que c'est" question is heating up again, in venues far and wide. First it's the topic of discussion between the ever-insouciant David Carr and my screening-room buddy A.O. Scott at the New York Times' new kinda-video-podcast series "The Sweet Spot," which kind of proceeds from Carr's misapprehension that the function of criticism is buzzkill. Mr. Scott strives mightily to correct Carr's misapprehension, to very little avail, if the cutaways to Carr squinting in apparent disbelief are to be believed. "You're just defending your posse," the intelligent but querelous Carr parries, and it's a measure of how much film critics in particular are disrespected that Carr seems so much more willing to buy Roberta Smith's rationale for the existence of criticism rather than Scott's. Never mind that seven minutes and change is hardly sufficient time to really begin to address the question of what criticism actually IS, its ideal form, its history, how it both interesects with and differs from the practice of "reviewing" and so on.

The video spurred some social-media rumination from the ever laid-back and relaxed and terse movie blogger and entertainment journalist watchdog David Poland, who, on discovering a further rumination from my friendly acquaintance Michelle Dean, which quoted the infamous "Don't be critics, you people, I beg you" screed from Saint Dave Eggers, jumped on that shit like he'd just dug up a new Dead Sea Scroll (the Eggers piece in question is over a decade old, but no matter), and wrote up this commendation of it. Which in turn led to a really quite fascinating and ongoing comments thread which features, among other things, a lively exchange in which writer and scripter Drew McWeeney presses Poland to name the movie he actually worked on that apparently gives him, David Poland, the Sacred Dave Eggers Dispensation To Write Movie Criticism Because He's Actually Worked On A Movie. (In case you'd like more than just an inference, by the way, I'll come right out and say it: I have a lot of friends and colleagues in common with Eggers, etcetera, but I think that riff about critics and criticism is one of the bigger barrels of horseshit I've ever fallen face-first into, and it's pretty damn hippy-dippy horseshit at that. Examination and or analysis, which I figure to be the two key features of real criticism, do not amount to the same thing as sticking a pin through a butterfly's innards. Of course examination and or analysis don't really figure in a lot of stuff calling itself criticism these days, but that's hardly the point. The assertion that the critical impulse derives from the worst part of the self is itself absolutely despicable and nothing but a glob of Egger's own phlegmy resentment, of what I have no idea I'm sure.)

What comes out most plainly in this particular wash (and what a messy wash it is) is Poland's own aiding and abetting of an old myth about critics, that is, those who can't do, criticise. And, more specifically in this field, that every film critic is somehow a failed filmmaker. Poland actually comes out and admits that he "ended up in journalism and criticism, which I never wanted." He hastens to add "but I loved the idea of what would become The Hot Button." Yeah, me too. While Poland's admissions are apt to confirm the prejudices of critic-haters everywhere, I should like to say that, speaking strictly for myself, I did not enter criticism as a failed filmmaker.

Or did I? See this post for some background. And savor again the immortal line "There's nothing wrong with getting a hard-on in a movie theater." (And, if you're wondering how Danny Amis is doing, well, he's better these days; see here.) The Beach Movie experience was instructive, but did it sour me off the film business? I can't say it did; a move to L.A. was something I never considered, then or ever after. Before it, and after it, I was an avid reader of criticism and a spotty writer of material that I thought aspired to criticism. My heroes were Lester Bangs (whose band I saw a few times at CBGB; one of said bands had Billy Ficca on drums; Billy now plays in Gods and Monsters with my great friend Gary Lucas), James Wolcott, and Robert Christgau, among others. While I dicked around with making music in the late '70s/early '80s (and am currently dicking around with music again, and with the same group of dicks, or at least some of them), my biggest ambition at that time, I'm not kidding, was to write about rock and roll, in the Village Voice, and have Robert Christgau as my editor. And in 1984, at 24 years of age, I fulfilled that ambition. I wrote about the album The Naked Shakespeare, by Peter Blegvad (whose now-adult daughter, Kaye, a wonderful artist in her own right, who was not yet a gleam in Peter's eye when Shakespeare was made,I'm having coffee with tomorrow); a record Bob Christgau didn't like too much but which I had hectored him into allowing me to review over a correspondance beginning in the summer of 1983. Having thus acheived my ambition, I somehow had to fill out the rest of my professional life. Sigh. I did a lot of work as an editor, but criticism was something I always held as sacred even as I never really believed I was practicing it. To be entirely honest with you, I think in all the years I've been publishing, there's maybe two dozen pieces of mine that I could point to and say, "Yes, this is actual criticism." (One of those pieces is in this upcoming book.) I don't think reviewing and criticism are incompatible; indeed, they can't be. But reviewing, or deadline criticism if you want to call it that, has its own set of demands and stresses. To me, "real" criticism needs temporal and mental space to clear the field for a thorough examination OR, to go back to Eggers' imagery, to follow the "butterfly" on the path it takes. Or the work in question's pattern of reverberation if you will. This is not a realm where reviewing necessarily has the ABILITY to go.

But I love criticism, always have, and I love it as it was practiced by Baudelaire and I love it as it was practiced by David Foster Wallace and, well, and so on. I love it as it was practiced by Nick Tosches, even when he was writing about albums he never even listened to. I often tell people that I would have been happy to have aged into the Stanley Kaufmann of Premiere, had the magazine lasted. I am in complete concurrence with Manny Farber: "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." SO in case you wonder why I tend to take the pulings and mewlings of pseud jagoff opinion-mongerers calling themselves "critics" so personal-like, well, it isn't JUST because I'm a reactive sorehead lunatic.

The current logistical irony is that, in the contemporary environment, I'm compelled to explore making a living in other forms of writing. One of which, as it happens, is....well, I imagine you can guess.

UPDATE: David Poland is, as you'll see in comments below, not thrilled with my characterization of him. Seriously, while I admit that I'm quite prone to going overboard when making sport of other writers, the point of this piece was not meant to be "David Poland's an asshole," or any such thing, and I regret having given the impression, if I did. I have my differences with Poland on a lot of things, including modes of expression, but I'm not in a position to make real judgments on the guy, and I do believe that if nothing else that his heart is in the right place, integrity wise. But as another man once said in a not-entirely dissimilar context, these are the jokes, people.